Office Tower Set For Downers Grove

Trammell Crow Co. has acquired 43 acres in west suburban Downers Grove for a project with office towers up to 20 stories tall and a luxury hotel with as many as 450 rooms, The Tribune has learned.

The as-yet unnamed project will be patterned after Hamilton Lakes, a 300- acre, office-hotel development by Trammell Crow at Thorndale Avenue and Ill. Hwy. 53 in Itasca, according to Ron Lunt, a Trammell Crow partner.

It will be next to a planned interchange of the proposed Du Page County Tollway at Butterfield Road and about a mile north of where the new highway will cross the East-West Tollway (Ill. Hwy. 5).

The Du Page toll road, which is expected to be started next year and opened by early 1989, ``is the key to our project,`` Lunt said.

``We`ll be sitting at a major interchange in the center of the Oak Brook- Naperville office corridor . . . and will be connected to the Woodfield-Hamilton Lakes market, as well as O`Hare (International Airport).``

If Downers Grove officials give their approval, the first phase of Trammell Crow`s eight-year project will consist of an 18-to-20-story, 515,000- square-foot office high-rise. The building will have a sloped copper roof and an exterior of reddish granite, beige limestone and gray- or bronze-tinted glass.

``We`re trying to make a statement with the first building,`` Lunt said.

``Future buildings could be more in the 15-story range . . . and some, in the 3-to-10-story range.``

The first building is expected to be started next summer and completed in early 1988. Plans also call for a three-story, 60,000-square-foot rotunda building. It would contain offices, retailers, a restaurant with up to 150 seats, a delicatessen with up to 80 seats and, possibly, a sports club at the base of the office tower.

Additionally, there will be a private dining club with about 200 seats and 12,000 square feet on the top floor of the tower, a five-level parking deck for 1,800 cars, and an enclosed pedestrian skybridge that would lead to a Radisson Suites hotel being built in the adjacent Wood Creek Business Park.

But the Radisson Suites won`t be the only hotel in the vicinity for very long. Trammell Crow plans to construct its own hotel in the second phase of its project, which could be started in 1988 and finished in 1990.

The hotel probably will be 12 stories tall, contain between 250 to 450 rooms, ``and be a full-service, high-end hotel on the scale of the Hamilton,`` a 420-room luxury hotel at Hamilton Lakes, Lunt said.